“What I hear over and over and over again from my students is, I don't use AI for things that I care about and I use AI for the parts of college I don't care about. I've heard this dozens, maybe hundreds of times from students. So maybe as faculty our job is not so much to assign work and expect it to be done, but to convince people that this matters and they should care about our class.”
Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Asked whether all his students use AI as healthily as his guest co-panelist does, the CMU professor says no, and that AI has exposed an old assumption in teaching: that students had no easy button.
Transcript
…more of, oh, if I wanted to understand a concept better, I would have it. Or when we had our sets finally completed, and if the, say, the answers were a bit different from mine, I would ask AI, oh, like, you know, what's this solution that the answers, like the, say, the teachers had come up with?
…like. Like an almost idealized perspective on how to deal with AI in this context. She's using it to make her better, not just get the thing done faster. Do you see that kind of healthy attitude in all of your students? And if not, how do you encourage everyone to have such a healthy attitude?
I definitely see that healthy attitude in some of my students. And I definitely don't see that healthy attitude in all of my students, right? And I think that in some ways, this exposes maybe some weak points that have existed in education for a long time. I think a lot of instructors or faculty just kind of relied on the fact that if you assigned work, the only thing the student could do was either not do it or work it out themselves. But now, kind of, there's this third way of there is this easy button. And so part of the instructor's job, I think, is to convince the students to care and convince this work matters. What I hear over and over and over again from my students, whenever I ask them in an anonymous way or someplace where I think they're being honest with me after the class or something like that, they almost all say, I don't use AI for things that I care about and I use AI for the parts of college I don't care about. I've heard this dozens, maybe hundreds of times from students, right? And so maybe as a faculty member, our job is not so much to just assign work and expect it to be done, but now we have to motivate people to convince them that this matters…
Yeah, using AI to simply endure something and push through it, but at the end, the end justifies the means can leave people, the word I've been using is atrophied. The analogy, and I think I talked to you about this, Julia, in previous conversations, is that you need to go work out to work your…
We did this fun activity at the beginning of the course. We explicitly talked to our students about this, about their AI usage. We talked through what we think is appropriate, how they should use it, describing a process like Julia described. But then we had like a quiz at the beginning of the…
Well, that is a great analogy. And it also gets us thinking about what does it actually mean to be human, right? If the thing can do art, if it can do everything, then what are we for? And you may have heard the term meat proxy, where I ask you a thing, you ask the bot, then the bot tells you, and…
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